JP Howard curates and nurtures Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon (WWBPS), a forum offering all writers, but especially women, at all levels, a monthly venue to come together in a positive and supportive space. The Salon has been featured in Poets & Writers Magazine and on CUNY-TV’s cable tv program Study with the Best!” She is the recipient of Brooklyn Arts Council Grants on behalf of the Salon for 2014 through 2017. JP is an alum of the VONA/Voices Writers Workshop, as well as a Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging LGBT Voices Fellow. JP was a Cave Canem Fellow-in-Residence at The Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA) and completed a residency at Soul Mountain Retreat.

For Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018, JP Howard will offer the workshop, Radicalizing the Personal Essay or Narrative Poem with Lorde and Baldwin at the Helm.

In this generative workshop, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde’s words will serve as agents of change to agitate, empower and inspire participants to make the personal political. Essays, poems, and video footage of Baldwin and Lorde will be used as prompts, to create powerful mini-personal essays and/or narrative, memoir-themed political poems. This workshop will provide an opportunity for multiple writing prompts, allow those enrolled to share bold new pieces in the workshop and receive feedback from the instructor, as well as dialogue with enrolled participants. – JP Howard

We beautiful Black boys. We
got so much poise. We
look like grown men. We
keep coming to an early end. We
got Mamas who keep mourning. We
just want to see a new morning. We
smart and get good grades. We
keep getting so much shade. We
rise early and study hard. We
still got cops asking for I.D. cards. We
wear hoodies and travel with friends. We
tired of being seen through same old lens. We
want history to stop rewinding and repeating. We
don’t want to be a part of senseless beatings. We
need our brilliance to be widespread. We
got no choice but to move ahead.